I want on the blacklist Ma was on!

Yesterday in a new book that Ma Ying-jeou published, he tries to counter recent accusations that while in college in Boston, he was a KMT spy who helped put pro-Taiwanese independence kids on a blacklist, which resulted in most of them being stopped from coming back to Taiwan for years.

馬在書中指出，大學時代他積極投入保釣，校園中就有人說他是激進份子搞學運，多年後他碰到那時的調查局長沈之岳，沈告訴他：「馬先生，以前我們對你有些誤會」，他才知道曾被調查局列入「黑名單」。馬表示，後來他到美國留學，儘管他在美國發行的刊物批判左派、反對台獨，但絕對不會去打別人小報告，害別人回不了國。

In his book Ma Ying-jeou notes that during his college years he was
actively involved in the campaign to protect the Diaoyu islands [a set
of islands disputed by China, Taiwan and Japan]. Some of his fellow students
accused of of being a radical activist. Several years later, when he ran into
Chief Prosecutor Shen Chi-yue (沈之岳), Shen told him: "Mr. Ma, we used to
have the wrong impression of you." It was only at this time that he realized he
had been on the Prosecutor's office "blacklist." Ma Ying-jeou said that when he
later went to study in the United Sates, although he did write articles
attacking leftists and Taiwanese independence, he would not report on any
of those students, since they would not be able to come home.

OK, this is fairly laughable. If you can get on a blacklist and then win scholarships to study overseas and come home and immediately become the President's personal English secretary, I want on that blacklist!

If you ask me, this is really a campaign tactic to try and (1) understate the gravity of being on a blacklist (2) insulate himself from accusations of being part of the privileged class (3) deflect questions about his reporting of those students.

There's plenty of eyewitness accounts of Ma taking photographs of Taiwanese Independence activists in the states and then being chased by them, since they knew the photos would be sent back to KMT headquarters; and there's even some accounts of professors at the school knowing he was a KMT spy. Now basically, it's all hearsay, and none of it is real evidence. Any such hard evidence would be locked up somewhere in KMT headquarters anyway, I'd guess.